Author: Carina Yervasi
Translation | Lin Qian
Editing | Wang Zhuxin
Originally included in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies , Vol. 4, No. 2, 2000
5511 words, 10 minutes to read Even the most typical woman talks about a typical day in her life, and if you listen, the words can be subversive. —Mary Cardinal[1]
The alternative film practice of the 1970s mirrored the everyday lives of women and helped to radically rethink everyday life from a family perspective. In many ways, the alternative cinema of the 1970s reshaped interest in (traditional and non-traditional) family interests and female relationships in general, while trying to create a film that was non-sexist and non-classical. In Jeanne Dillman, Chantal Ackermann articulates the relationship between her filmmaking and her reflections on feminism throughout the 1970s and in three areas: the struggle of the working class economics, the form of alternative cinema, family crises. The title itself also foreshadows what the film is about: a woman, and a location. [Editor's note: "Jeanne Dielman" original title: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ] Jeanne is a petty bourgeoisie, widowed in a working-class business district of Brussels, in addition to being an extremely In addition to being a methodical housewife, she was also a prostitute, serving afternoon clients in her bedroom, "pour arrondir les fins de mois" (literally "to the end of the month" or "to make ends meet"). As an alternative film that is simultaneously reflective and productive, Ackerman's present works through experiments with hierarchical narrative structures and audiovisual language, as well as on family crises and current family structures ("structure familiale actuelle"). A further critique of the problem explores the transformation of the film's narrative mode.
Firmly rooted in the still-developing feminist cinema of the 1970s, Ackerman's work is self-aware of its place in culture and the representation of women in its video productions. In her essay Teresa de Lauretis, Rethinking Women's Cinema, Teresa de Lauretis shows that in the 1970s feminism existed between the practical and theoretical aspects and between writing and filmmaking. Huge split. The pioneering work of French feminists, as well as the contributors to the Belgian feminist journal Cahiers du Grif at the time, were instrumental in increasing the spread of feminism in many academic societies. At the same time, public awareness groups and grassroots feminist efforts for social change in reproductive rights and women's representation in politics are affecting both Europe and the Americas. In other words, two distinct feminisms are developing: one is practical feminism, dealing with women; the other is theoretical feminism, dealing with gender. Filmmaking also shows a tendency to get caught up in these two different forms. There is often ideological indecision within film groups and film crews about what should be the priority for such emerging films: whether to focus on the “real” everyday life of society as reflected in family crises, or (by borrowing from avant-garde creative approaches). , reorganizing film narrative and form to create) idealized images of feminists?
Ackerman's film bridges the gap between two emerging production trends in feminist cinema of the 1970s. Her work draws from the respective intellectual spheres of both schools, making it possible for non-realist films to capture a certain reality. For this gap, Ackerman pays attention to the length of the film, editing techniques and experimental narratives, and questions the expressiveness and discourse power of the film. German feminist film director Helke Sander's 1971 fictional film A Bonus for Irene (1971) explored the role of women in the public and private spheres. In contrast to this, "Jeanne Dillman" has no traditional narrative, nor does it attempt to balance formal considerations and screen image presentation through a standardized plot. [2] While Sand argues that the problems people encounter at work can lead to further problems at home, Ackerman creates a "social" workplace that is isolated from the outside world and confined to domestic spaces. In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma, Ackerman stated that (himself) "if it wasn't for the women's movement, the film would not have been made in that way, at least the idea would not have been so clear"[3 ] (qtd. in Mayne 202). Ackman's unwavering support for the women's movement can be seen in two ways. On the one hand, she has always been at the level of documentary methods, combining the two directions of showing women in society and showing society itself (especially Jeanne's scene on the streets of Brussels). At the same time, she formally uses a new language that paradoxically expresses the impossibility of the representation of "real" female figures in traditional film language. "Jeanne Dillman" directs its attention to the surface of the respective working mechanisms of the two worlds of film presentation and society, as well as the hidden mechanisms beneath the surface. Together, these two elements make up Jeanne's monotonous and banal world. The film is thus a feminist critique of the everyday oppression women experience at home and a system of artistic and linguistic representation.
Chantal Ackerman was one of the first feminists to question the "family" narrative template by experimenting with classless cinematic language in her work. The production crew of Jeanne Dierman is entirely female, which relies heavily on Ackerman's theoretical stance. In an interview with French feminist journalist Marie-Claude Treilhou, Ackerman said:
I especially want to start at the level of film language, considering that the images in the film that are subject to the principle of ellipses are the images that are the most despised... This is because images also have classes. For example, a car accident or a close-up of a kiss is higher in this hierarchy than washing dishes [shots]. Dishwashing is minimal, especially [the dishwashing shot] from behind. And, this is not accidental, but closely related to the position of women in the social class... [I] use the images between these images to create. (92)[4] These “new” images are Ackerman’s registers, which do not contribute to the establishment of “image hierarchies”, but rather promote a new feminist (hierarchical) film practice in which Case, it shows how Jeanne (Dephine Serig) is tragically trapped and trapped in the "family" system that regulates (classified) social ideals and structures. In addition to Ackerman's theoretical position that classless images need to be considered, feminist film critics Nicole-Lise Bernheim and Françoise Maupin It is proposed that "slow tempo" and the re-enactment of real time draw the line between feminist cinema and traditional mainstream cinema.
These classless images, slow pace, and real time distinguish the practice of feminist cinema from mainstream (mass entertainment) cinema. Ackerman in her journal of family, chores and daily life at home
This new way of practice is demonstrated. Although she only speaks of the "hierarchy of images" in her films, we can actually see how she examines time, space and sound with egalitarian or non-hierarchical measures. Any of these three factors can equally reveal Jeanne Dierman's mediocre everyday life and her repressed way of life. These factors also include what I call Ackerman's "economies" [5]. As B. Ruby Rich points out, "Ackerman defied the acceleration of real time in the cinematic world and opted for an artificial real-time rhythm... The style was minimalist, Removed all distractions and focused on the most fundamental and mysterious component of film as a medium: the passage of time” (51). The length of a live shot (or long shot) reveals the actual time a film actor spends performing. This means that the movie time and the audience's time are aligned: without editing, a 5-minute run on the screen would take 5 minutes to finish. However, the entire movie doesn't exactly present "real" time. Ackerman still made a few edits at some important points. [6] I think the origin of this style is extremely dependent on the concept of family and frugality, which is called aesthetic frugality. This is because she barely changes plot settings, shooting, framing, lighting, editing, and sound. In other words, Ackermann's frugality works at different levels: from Jeanne's savings in totaling receipts after shopping or cooking in a stockpot at the dinner table, to the minimal changes in the trajectory of Jeanne's daily life—the kind of The immutability also allows us to see any changes in herself if any—finally, to the temporal breaks created by Ackerman’s subtle break with continuity. [7] As Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa), it is necessary to stop using existing economic terms to explain women's "thrift". While focusing on family, Ackerman developed her feminist practice outside the prevailing filmmaking norms. (qtd . Marks and de Courtivron 264) She does not edit the action for the plot, but uses the duration of the action as the plot. In this way, she uses her works to shake the boundaries of traditional films and try to conceive a new film language . In fact, what makes Jeanne Dillman's work, one of the few films produced by an all-female crew, so special in a feminist canon is that it doesn't rely on a traditional plot The continuous narrative of the character sets the character, but draws the audience into this family spectacle through the character's real-time, meticulous routine. Ackerman's aesthetic frugality embraces the cinematic language familiar to audiences without (or at least very little) following the rules of sequential editing, so that the basic components of his films—time, image, and sound— It is subversive. In other words, Ackerman's feminist films have those images and sounds that mainstream filmmaking cuts out during the editing process. This sound and painting, created almost exclusively with long takes, is what Ackerman calls her video "recording." For example, Ackerman frequently uses live footage (or long footage) to reveal how much time Jeanna actually spends doing chores. And this way of dealing with time does show his interest in hyperreal, a kind of existence based on reality but beyond the reality of everyday life. [8] Ackerman takes a practical look at the family by questioning time as a fundamental component of the film and questioning the auditory information obtained in the film.
Jeanne's "plot", if you can call it that, is the demeanor of the housekeeping, the claustrophobic, the defiance of the plot structure of the traditional film genre. At some point, Jeanne's cookie-cutter chores almost symbolize a non-narrative, ritualistic abstraction, similar to her reading the newspaper and drying her hands, the existence and function of this domestic life that is what the narrative is all about . Ultimately, the narrative coherence and meaning of Jeanne's plot begins to fill in after the film's recurring stereotypes and expressions have been slightly embellished. Ackerman pulls the audience out of the folded narratives and spatiotemporal cuts of traditional cinema. She advocates the unconventional use of familiar images and sounds, thereby transforming the mundane and monotonous routines of household chores into narrative elements. This pragmatism is also reflected in Ackerman's family narrative as an oppressive statement of "true" frugality.
As in the women's movement, as we saw in Anne Caro and Danielle Jaeggi's documentary about the women's garment workers in Serizai, the economy and family The concept of is given additional meaning. Another contemporary example of the same focus on the economy and the family is Marie Mineur, a member of the Walloon feminist group, who wrote in the May 1972 issue of the Belgian feminist magazine Les cahiers de libre examen ( Les cahiers de libre examen ). Their project “aims to help women with limited financial means” (qtd. in Denis and Van Rokeghem 45). Seemingly a direct response to this claim, Ackerman understood the importance of representing women with low incomes on the screen, and brought into the image the textual and pictorial theoretical studies that describe the representation of these women. The formal and political aspects of Jeanne Dierman also correspond to the issues of the first French independent magazine for women, Le torchon brûle ( Le torchon brûle ), when it was first published, and to what feminists of the time called The only possible countercultural representation of the "patriarchal" order - the female counterpart in the symbol. At the time, the magazine's cover featured a psychedelic-style pattern of arrows coming from different directions with the words "whore," "mother," "slut," and more. In this sense, Ackerman himself is also trying to fight against these discourses that imprison the image of women from all directions in society.
There is no doubt that the background of the creation of Jeanne Dillman is based on the women's movement in the early 1970s, which demanded real economic change, but also on a theoretical concept that revolutionized the circulation of images in patriarchal culture. . Jeanne Dillman's style is heavily influenced by the North American experimental avant-garde films of Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, as well as Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, L'annéedernière à Marienbad, 1959 ), French Left Bank and Direct Cinema of the 1950s - Jean Rouch's Documentary, and Agnès Varda (Agnès Varda, Cleo de 5 à 7, 1962 ) influence of feminist fiction. Same period in the 1970s, Marguerite Dura Marguerite Duras' films also draw on the latter three genres, making good use of time and space. Works such as "Natha lie Granger " (1972 ) and "Song of India" (India Song, 1974) and so on are all films that try to focus on the concept of family and the status of women in society. For example, in the films of Jeanne Dillman and Natalie Granger, women are most often positioned at home, using images of them trapped in a window or door frame to express the repressive nature of women claustrophobia. As the scholar E. Ann Kaplan has studied, one way of thinking about gender and status from the perspective of the family is to first recognize the opposition created by the division of space—the “opposition of house and street” precisely It also represents the opposition between males who are external and public and women who are internal and private (96). However, both Duras and Ackerman have also taken a further step in the embodiment of space beyond vision through sound experiments. Natalie Granji and Songs of India revolve around the theme of voice—or rather, the absence of voice—with an emphasis on narrative silence. For example, even though the character has left and the camera remains in the room, we can still hear the ambient sound, the still narrative dead silence in the empty room. In Natalie Granger, after all the characters have left, the radio blares in the room. In "Jeanne Dillman," the sound of the street floods the living room.
-To be continued- [1] Quoted from page 110 of the article by Phillier and Pérez in C inéma pratique (if not otherwise noted, all French-English translations are done by the original author) [2] Herke Sand's filmmaking responds to the genre of "German workers' cinema". Worker films often focus on men in the workplace and issues of exploitation. Usually, such films are about the working and upper management classes of German society after World War II.
[3] This interview was originally published in Daniel Dablox's "Interview with Chantal Ackerman", among others
[4] This paragraph is originally in French: Je voulais surtout travailler sur le langage, en prenant des images qui dans le cinéma en général font partie des ellipses, qui sont les images les plus dévalorisées...Car il ya une hiérarchie dans les images . Par exemple, un accident de voiture ou un baiser en gros plan, c'est plus élevé dans la hiérarchie que de faire la vaisselle. Faire la vaisselle, c'est le plus bas, surtout de dos. Et ce n'est pas par hasard mais bien en rapport avec la place de la femme dans la hiérarchie sociale...[J]e travaille dans les ¡ mages qui sont entre les images.
[5] Theresa de Laura believes that "Jeanne Dillman" contains "two logics" that are always present, pointing to the "character and director, image and Shots” (132). She borrowed the word "logic" from Janet Bergstrom, writing about Jeanne Dillman: "The camera's point of view cannot be like that of any one character. The point of view is constructed in that way. Its interests are not limited to fiction. The camera reveals itself in its uniformity and predictability, as Jeanne is precise. Yet the camera always retains its logic; Jeanne's The order is disrupted, and with the murder, the text reaches its logical end, because Jeanne ends with it” (117). I disagree with Bergstrom because I think the camera follows a logic of change, rather than staying on a fixed schedule like Jeanne. For more discussion of these aspects of Jeanne Dillman, see Ackerman and Lakeland.
[6] For example, on the first night, when Jeanne went to bed and turned off the lights, Ackerman cut to the subtitle title "fin du premier jour" (the end of the first day) on a black background, then switched to The morning when Jeanne turned on the lights. This omission was also used to cut out the evening walks of Jeanne and Sylvian after dinner. We saw them leave the building, throw rubbish on the side of the road, and walk the dark streets. We then see them go back into the building and into the elevator, and the scene cuts to the entrance of the apartment.
[7] "Continuity editing", short for the technical term, refers to compressing the time and space of a film while emphasizing the coherence and logic of the narrative. "Classic" editing is discussed in detail on pages 246-291 of the Bodwell and Thompson article.
[8] For an extended study of hyperrealism in Chantal Ackerman's films, see Margulies' Nothing Happens .
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